Missing data causing rig reconstruction mystery

Allen G. Breed and Curt Anderson

Published 7:00 pm, Wednesday, May 12, 2010

A “black box” can reveal why an airplane crashed or how fast a car was going in the instant before an accident. Yet there are no records of a critical safety test supposedly performed during the fateful hours before the Deepwater Horizon oil rig exploded in the Gulf of Mexico.

They went down with the rig.

While some data were being transmitted to shore for safekeeping right up until the April 20 blast, officials from Transocean, the rig owner, told Congress that the last seven hours of its data are missing and that all written logs were lost in the explosion.

The gap poses a mystery for investigators: What decisions were made — and what warnings might have been ignored? Earlier tests, which suggested that explosive gas was leaking from the mile-deep well, were preserved.

“There is some delay in the replication of our data, so our operational data, our sequence of events ends at 3 o’clock in the afternoon on the 20th,” Steven Newman, president and CEO of Transocean Ltd, told a Senate panel. The rig blew up at 10 p.m., killing 11 workers and unleashing a gusher that has spewed millions of gallons (liters) of oil into the Gulf.

Houston attorney Tony Buzbee, who represents several rig workers involved in the accident, questioned whether what he called “the phantom test” was even performed.

“I can just tell you that the Halliburton hands were scratching their heads,” said Buzbee, whose clients include one of the Halliburton crew members responsible for cementing the well to prepare for moving the drilling rig to another site.

Buzbee said that when Halliburton showed BP PLC and Transocean officials the results of the pressure tests that suggested gas was leaking, the rig workers were put on “standby.” BP is the rig operator and leaseholder.

Buzbee said one of his clients told him the “Transocean and BP company people got their heads together,” and 40 minutes later gave the green light.

The attorney said the Halliburton crew members were not shown any new test results.

“They said they did their own tests, and they came out of Oklahoma,” he said. “But with the phantom test that Transocean and BP allegedly did, there was no real record or real-time recordation of that test.”

Buzbee suggested that BP and Transocean had monetary reasons for ignoring the earlier tests.

“The facts are as they are,” he said. “The rig is $500,000 a day. There are bonuses for finishing early.”